“At Belle Marsh, I had everything a little girl could want—her family, one ox and a hog, orange and other fruit and nut trees, lots of room to explore and the most beautiful marsh you’d ever want to see … The high tides on Sapelo are so big that on an especially big tide like a spring tide, when you looked outside, the whole marsh would be white with water. Absolutely white with water … We had beautiful white egrets and ibis that draped themselves in the trees, so many seagulls they could block out the light when they flew over you … There was usually a gentle breeze blowing so we had a saltwater smell all the time. On high tide, you’d smell the salt more and on low tide, you’d get a whiff of the sea and everything in it. Either way, the smell meant home to us. “Just smell that marsh,” Mama would say proudly. “It smell’ so marshy.””1
Cornelia Walker Bailey
A chain of Sea Islands lies off the southeastern coast of the United States, extending from Wilmington, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida. Cornelia Walker Bailey was a lifelong resident of one of these islands—Sapelo Island—and we can hear in her description just how much the beauty and feel of the environment were woven into her family’s daily life. While the majesty of these islands is evident, they do have a darker past.
Much like the rest of the New World, the Native American groups who inhabited these islands were forced off of them shortly after the arrival of European colonizers. By the end of the 17th century, the islands had traded hands from the Spanish to the British. Once the British realized the agricultural capabilities of the islands and the coastal mainlands, the areas were rapidly outfitted with plantations and enslaved Africans.2 Some of the plantations trafficked in cotton and indigo, while others produced the crop that was responsible for the enormous growth in the South’s wealth at the time: rice.3
In these pages, you will learn about Gullah Geechee legacies and histories through the lens of agriculture, aquaculture and the ingredients that build delicious dishes, and once built empires. From one side of the Atlantic to the other, from freedom to slavery to freedom again, Black knowledge has transformed the soil and landscapes around them.
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Footnotes
- Cornelia Walker Bailey with Christena Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island (New York: Doubleday, 2000) 19 and 20. Available here.
- “Sea Islands,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc, Accessed May 1, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/place/Sea-Islands.
- “The Gullah Geechee,” Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, Accessed March 22, 2021, https://gullahgeecheecorridor.org/thegullahgeechee/.